Demi Moore recently opened up about her unconventional childhood. During an appearance on The Drew Barrymore Show, the 61-year-old actress shared a story about how her parents allowed her to drive on the freeway at the young age of 13 despite not having a license.
“Driving on the freeway, I mean, my parents would say, ‘Okay, here’s the deal. You can take the car. If you get stopped, you just have to say you took the car without permission,'” Moore recalled. “They kind of saw that as a win-win for everybody, but that is lunacy.”
In a candid 2019 interview with Harper’s Bazaar, Moore recalled a traumatic childhood moment when she helped save her mother from a drug overdose by using her small fingers to dig pills out of her mother’s mouth.
While Moore’s biological father was Charles Harmon Sr., she was primarily raised by her stepdad Dan Guynes. Tragically, Guynes died by suicide in 1980 when Moore was just 18 years old.
Despite these difficult experiences, Moore told Barrymore that she has learned to accept her parents’ limitations, stating, “I accept that my parents did the best they could, and my mom did the best she could with the level of consciousness and awareness that she had at the time.”
The actress also spoke about how her experience as a mother has given her new insights into her own mother’s struggles. Moore shares three daughters, Rumer, 36, Scout, 33, and Tallulah, 30, with ex-husband Bruce Willis. Becoming a parent herself helped her understand that her mother’s failures were not from a lack of love but from her own search for happiness and fulfilment.
“I don’t think my mother came into this world with the intention to be less than nurturing, to be neglectful, to not really be able to show up as a parent for me,” Moore reflected. “I think she came in with the innocence of a soul that wanted to find happiness, to feel love and to confirm. And when I look and find the compassion for my mother, I know that in that, I then open the pathway for my children to have compassion for me.”
Barrymore, who has had her own share of complex family dynamics, resonated with Moore’s words, saying, “And that is why I say to my mom, ‘I love you,’ because the hard, weird, crazy choices you made led me to here.”